Thursday, October 7, 2010

Busy time upon me.

Wow. Life keeps coming at us, hey?

I've been busy busy busy. The bulk of my busyness revolves around this Ache Super Sale I'm working on. Oh, what sale is that, you ask? Basically, the experimental record label I run is turning 10 years old this year! Wild. I've been running this thing for 1/3 of my entire life. What a thought!

So, to celebrate (and, honestly, to help make a theoretical dent in Ache's daunting debt) I'm throwing a sale. Not just one of those 10% off type sales, though. More like one of those liquidation sales you see when a business goes under or moves and it's completely chaotic because everything is so cheap. The kind of sale that evokes people to fight each other, step on each other's faces, and throw out their babies so they can fill up the carriage with more wares.

The label: Ache is a forum for different ideas about what music can be, and how it can function without any rules of genre or concern for commercial success. Each Ache release comes with a feeling of excitement and hope that it might move you and, if even slightly, change your idea of what music is. A point of pride for me is Ache's diversity. From African street music to beautiful drones to Japanese thrash, Ache's only ethos is that the music is challenging and does not function within the guidelines of the conventional music industry. If I believed that an artist was creating music purely to sell records (or what I call "playing the game"), I would not attach the Ache name to it.

The sale: I'll be selling everything between $1 and $5 both in person around Vancouver and digitally everywhere else in the world (plus shipping, of course)

So if you've ever been curious about the music I put out, or if you are interested in hearing new, untainted musical ideas, now is the time to check out Ache. I have a streaming audio player of some tracks from the catalog for you to get acquainted with. Enjoy!

For those of you in Vancouver, I'm piecing together all sorts of celebratory events for the sale as well: A birthday party with Babe Rainbow and my new band, Mt Career; a DJ in-store at Zulu Records where I'll be playing only Ache stuff while people hang out, have a few drinks, and buy records; and even a weekly pop-up store at the Toast Collective! More info on each of these is available here

I also just finished my first CAVING mix yesterday! But I'll write more about that in another post. This one is already feeling like the It of Stephen King's career. Length-wise, I mean.